Páginas

viernes, octubre 18, 2013

El misterio es el angel, el ministro, el policía, dixit Agamben

Agamben de cabeza y con las manos alzadas para protegerse del golpe.

Through these distinctions the entire economic-providential
apparatus (with its polaritiesordinatio/executio, providence/fate, Kingdom/Government) is passed on
as an unquestioend inheritance to modern politics. What was needed to assure
the unity of being and divine action, reconciling the unity of
substance with the trinity of persons and the government of particulars with
the universality of providence, has here the strategic function of reconciling
the sovereignty and generality of the law with the public economy and the
effective government of individuals. The most nefarious consequence of this
theological apparatus dressed up as political legitimation is that it has
rendered the democratic tradition incapable of thinking government and its
economy (today one would instead write: economy and its government, but the two
terms are substantially synonymous). On the one hand, Rousseau conceives of
government as the essential political problem; on the other hand, he minimizes
the problem for its nature and its foundation, reducing it to the activity of
the execution of sovereign authority. The ambiguity that seems to settle the
problem of government by presenting it as the mere execution of a general will
and law has weighed negatively not only upon the theory, but also upon the
history of modern democracy. For this history is nothing but the progressive
coming to light of the substantial untruth of the primacy of legislative power
and the consequent irreducibility of government to mere execution. And if today
we are witnessing the government and the economy's overwhelming domination of a
popular sovereignty emptied of all meaning, this perhaps signifies that
Occidental democracies are paying the political price of a theological
inheritance that they had unwittingly assumed through Rousseau.

The ambiguity that consists in conceiving government as
executive power is an error with some of the most far-reaching consequences in
the history of Western political thought. It has meant that modern political
thought becomes lost in abstractions and vacuous mythologems such as the Law,
the general will, and popular sovereignty, and has failed to confront the
decisive political problem.What
our investigation has shown is that the real problem, the central mystery of
politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it
is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police—that is to
say, the governmental machine that they form and support. (276)